The handling of products or articles for the treatment of same by means of, for example, the carrying out upon them of specific operations of working, machining, processing, assembling, packing and the like is normally carried out by conveying said products or articles along a circular path for carrying out of operations by the use of operative means carried entirely or partly by conveying elements provided with an intermittent motion, that is with periods of advance alternating with periods of dwell, in coincidence with the last-named of which almost the totality of said operations and/or the passing or transferring of the products or articles themselves from one conveying element to another succeeding element are carried out.
With the handling devices designed in this way, that is comprising intermittently moving conveying elements for allowing the greater part of the aforementioned operations and/or the transfer of the products themselves from one conveying element to another to be carried out upon the products during the periods of rest of each interruption, the operating speed is of necessity somewhat limited and this clearly gives rise to greater production costs.
With the objective of increasing the unitary operating speed of the aforementioned handling devices for the purpose of clearly reducing the production costs of the products obtained and/or treated, many continuous movement devices have been proposed, but in practical reality these have been found to be none other than hybrid devices since at least during the phase of transference of the product to be treated from operative means of a preceding conveying element to operative means of a succeeding conveying element, the product is at rest in that having been released by the operative means of said preceding conveying element and then struck by the operative means of said succeeding conveying element for the purposes of control or taking-over, with possible damage to the product itself. There are also disadvantages in regard to the uniformity of the later phase of conveying, or because in all cases there is always a constant circular conveying velocity of the operative means, therefore a high velocity, even for the more delicate handling operations such as, for example, that of transferring or passing the product from one conveying element to another, and also for the still more delicate operation of controlling or taking-over the product itself and the various elements which can intervene in the handling, especially during the phase of feeding to said operative means of the respective conveying elements.